Cryptography moved from military applications to a consumer application in the form of email. Additional consumer applications, such as file storage, network storage, and whole disk encryption followed. These consumer applications present challenging key infrastructure issues.
It is necessary to provide key management services that allow an entity to manage all of the keys of users and systems. Currently, many systems have keys that are essentially unmanaged and are susceptible to security attacks. Commonly, keys have no lifecycle management. In some instances, keys are many years old and there is no way to re-key them, replace them or revoke them.
Accordingly, it is desirable to provide an extensible, scalable architecture that can manage keys in a consolidated fashion.